How Mayor de Blasio can truly lead on climate change

We applaud Mayor Bill de Blasio for highlighting the importance of taking action to combat climate change and create more fairness in the city ("Preparing the climate change means making New York fairer too"). But his op-ed neglects to mention the best way to achieve his laudable goal of lowering greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050: establishing a citywide requirement for greater energy efficiency on private buildings.

The city’s private buildings produce the majority of greenhouse gas emissions across the five boroughs. Requiring energy-efficiency upgrades and improvements at these buildings will make our city cleaner and more sustainable while creating thousands of good-paying jobs each year.

Requiring building owners to improve efficiency can spur employment growth for electricians, plumbers, carpenters, painters and operating engineers, as well as energy auditors and building-service workers. Many of those jobs are in unionized fields that offer good wages and benefits.

These new career paths in energy efficiency can expand economic opportunity for immigrants, people of color and women—New Yorkers living on the front lines of climate change and harmed by the inequality and unfairness de Blasio is committed to tackling.

There is strong evidence to suggest that private buildings will comply with a citywide energy efficiency requirement. In 2011, the city's Department of Environmental Protection required all buildings to switch from No. 6 oil for boilers to cleaner fuels by 2015, and from No. 4 oil to cleaner fuels by 2030.

The compliance rate has been outstanding—a nearly perfect 99.8%.

Maritza Silva-Farrell

The writer is executive director of ALIGN: the Alliance for a Greater New York, an advocacy group that builds alliances with labor, community and environmental-justice organizations.

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